Electronic publishing and institutional archives: utilising open-source software

The interest in open access and institutional archives in Norway is growing. In 2005, several university libraries, university college libraries and other research libraries met and discussed a joint effort to create institutional archives. The meeting resulted in the Pepia project with BIBSYS as a software partner. The project group decided to use the open source system DSpace as a software platform. A standard DSpace installation runs on a Tomcat servlet container. BIBSYS does not use this container, and we therefore needed to configure DSpace to get it to run successfully on our server. In addition we had some problems with integrating the DSpace development structure with our integrated development environment. Further we needed to create a new build process that effectively could build more than 30 applications from one source code. These changes were quite time consuming, but they were necessary so that we could have an efficient work environment. Out of the box DSpace has many of the functionalities that an institutional archive requires. In spite of this we needed to alter some of the functionality, especially the user management system. DSpace is a complex system, but with the active community we could get the help we needed. BIBSYS Brage, the result of the Pepia project, was launched as a beta version in December 2006. We look forward to develop BIBSYS Brage further, and are confidant that it will become a great system for the consortium.